Investigating Most Disturbing Exorcisms | Billy Hallowell

Well, let's talk about that for a couple minutes. So in the beginning of the book, you write in detail about several cases of demon possession and exorcism. What was like the craziest thing, you know, maybe perhaps the most disturbing thing that came out of your research on that specific topic?

The Gary, Indiana Case and the Most Bizarre Evidence

Oh gosh, there's so much. And there's some other stories that are weaved throughout the book that, you know, the ones in the beginning, the case in Indiana that, and by the way, this was a case, and I'm going to describe it, but that I was covering when I was at The Blaze.

This was something that one of the first introductions I had to the issue was this case surrounding a mother, her three children, and then a grandmother, her mom. So it was these two women and these three children, and they were in Gary, Indiana, in this rental house, and basically the mother was saying that they were experiencing all sorts of strange things, and there's something going on in my house, and people weren't really believing her.

The assumption was that maybe there was abuse, there was something else happening. What was so remarkable about this case is you rarely have examples where there's documentation, where you've got police officers and nurses and people on the record, okay?

It's not just, oh, somebody told me they experienced this. It's I saw these strange things happen. And not only are they on the record, they've spoken to a journalist from the Indy Star, and the Indy Star did a big story in 2014 on this case, and it was extensive, and it was well-documented, and it went international.

And so that case is really the most bizarre. And so when I was writing Playing With Fire, I spent a lot of time trying to track down a couple of key players in that case, not the family, but those around it, because we had all the quotes from the family.

They had been talking to media. We had all of that. But what I wanted to find were, am I going to talk with a sheriff or a priest, and they're going to tell me everything in this story is true. They're going to back it all up.

And that was my experience. They backed it all up, and there were so many crazy elements. But there is actually a report, and this is a CPS child services report that was filed in the midst of this turmoil that was going on.

And there was a child in this family in a hospital with the mother, the grandmother, a CPS worker, and a nurse. And when I say that, every time I tell this story, and I tell the story in the book, I almost laugh because it sounds so ridiculous.

It sounds like it's out of a horror movie. But this particular CPS worker claims that she saw this child in the middle of one of these fits walk up the side of the wall, okay? Now again, it sounds ridiculous.

He walks up the wall, and he flips over, and then he's standing before them. And you have a nurse who was in the room who backs up that claim, and they spoke to the Indy Star. Not only did they speak to the Indy Star, this is in the official CPS report, again, that you can pull up and read of this incident.

And so you've got a lot of pieces of this story that are so bizarre and that are on.

The record.

And so I interviewed a sheriff who was involved, and I spoke with the priest who handled the case, and they validated these many strange occurrences around the case.

Hollywood, Mental Illness, and Why People Take Exorcism Stories Seriously

Wow, walking up the wall. I mean, that is what the exorcist It's bizarre. You know, the pea soup and all that. Did you think that this phenomena was really real? Did you think it was mental illness?

And as you were doing the research into it, did you change your mind about all of this?

You know, I've always thought in my head that the... And I think this is the problem with a lot of the church. In our heads, we believe these things, right? And, you know, we could talk about pop culture in Hollywood.

The crazy thing is Hollywood talks about this stuff more than the church does. Now, I'm not saying they do it accurately, but they're actually more in tune, Hollywood, with talking about these issues than a lot of us are.

I went into this believing again in my head that it was true. I don't know that I believed it in my heart entirely. I think it's an entertaining thing to believe. It's one of those things that... You know, and that's how culture handles it, right?

But as you start to talk to people, you have a couple of options. You could say, these people are completely mentally ill and they imagined all this, A. Or B, they're making this all up for financial gain.

You could say that, right? Or, you know, there are other options. But when you start to interview people who seem completely sane, they have no prior history of mental illness. When you have people who literally disappear after a case happens, and they hide themselves because they don't want to talk about it, when you have people who are reluctant to speak about it, it becomes very hard to deny these things.

And so I do believe many of these stories. There's a woman, Amy, who you'll encounter in the book. And I don't want to give her entire story away. So Amy was completely fine, never had a mental health problem.

She was an avid runner, completely healthy. She was a nurse working in a hospital. And one night she treated a burn victim. And she shared this detail with me. And I haven't, it's an interesting detail, but it was a burn victim who she believed had experience, who had been in a meth house or some sort of drug house and an explosion unfolded.

And so as she's treating this guy, something just doesn't feel right. And after her shift, she goes home. She can't run in a straight line. She goes out to go for a jog. She can't run properly. And she goes to her husband and she's like, I think I'm having a nervous breakdown.

Something's not right. Now within eight days, Amy goes from a completely healthy nurse with no history of mental illness or anything else to being hospitalized, okay, with suspected mental illness. And this situation over the course of months devolved.

She loses her job. She's basically gone to the Mayo Clinic. She's going all over the place looking for answers, right? Looking for what's wrong with her. Is it physical? Is it mental? What is it? Now, one day she's having these ideas in her head, end your life, end your life.

And I'm educating this story, but eight months since this all started, she goes up to the second floor in her house and she was just consumed with ending her life. She was a nurse. So she would think through different ways she could do it.

Never had a suicidal thought before this. She goes up to her second floor window. She sits in the window. She's facing, so picture this, the windows behind you, you're facing inside your house. Okay, the screen's out of the window.

And she just drops herself out of the window from the second story. Okay, doesn't jump, just drops herself out of the window, lands on the pavement, nearly dies. And to this day is paralyzed from the waist down.

Now, while in the hospital during this time, she's telling people, I have a demon. I have a demon. She doesn't remember these things. In the hospital, a woman hears about her story at church. A woman who does deliverance ministry comes into the hospital, prays over her.

And over the course of time proceeding from that, Amy is completely fine, has not had any issue with mental illness again, and tells her story in the book. And it's a really compelling and fascinating story.

So there's so many stories like that. How do you explain it? How do you explain it?

Catholic Exorcism Rites, Protestant Deliverance, and Spiritual Authority

In your research, did you notice that there has to be some kind of a requirement that you have to be ordained in order to perform an exorcism? Are you supposed to pray certain things? How do exorcisms work in general?

Well, in the Catholic model, you would go through the rite of exorcism, which is, it's always the same. It's a specific prayer. It's said in a certain way. Catholics are much more likely than Protestants to use holy water and crucifixes.

And some Protestants might use crosses and holy water and other things. Some might not. One of the interesting things is that there was one deliverance minister I interviewed in the book who said he's actually seen those things.

He's a Protestant. Be successful sometimes. He said sometimes having those tools that the demons would respond, sometimes they wouldn't. He said, so there's a whole bunch of different schools of thought on this.

But I also know that there are people who very literally are Christians and they will walk in and they will sit down with somebody and say, whatever is inside of you, get out, you are not welcome here.

And that's the end of it. And so it's this really fascinating array of responses to it. Now, I think the core issue, the core of this would be that in order for this to be successful, the person doing it would need to be a Christian.

They would need to be truly, they'd need to truly have the Holy Spirit and have that authority over it because without it, you wouldn't. So that's what experts would generally tell me, regardless of the different idiosyncrasies and debates over what you would need and how you would need to do it, that that's the core.

But the other thing, and I think this is really important, and this comes up in the book towards the end of Playing With Fire, is that the person who's being healed, they are the centerpiece. They are the most important person in the room, right?

If they're seeking healing, they have to be willing to make the change. And we see this in scripture that Jesus tells us that if you go right back to it, if you're healed and you go right back to whatever you were doing, it's going to be seven times worse than it was when it first happened to you.

So that's an interesting prospect. And having that person be on board is important. There's a story, Dr. Richard Gallagher, well-known psychiatrist, and he actually consults for the Catholic Church. He's one of the few scientists who openly and doctors openly speaks out about this issue.

And he believes it firmly. He helps differentiate mental illness from possession. And he talks about a case where there was a satanic priestess in the 1980s who approached him and wanted help. She enjoyed worshiping Satan, but at the same time was scared and didn't want what was happening to be happening to her.

And yet a person like that, she was never healed because she wasn't willing to turn away from that activity, which is just bizarre and fascinating. He's written on her case for CNN and the Washington Post and lots of other places.

How People Become Open to Demonic Influence

So is there some kind of pattern that you noticed in your research where, I mean, does somebody have to invite a spirit inside them or can a spirit just enter without their, like an invitation? Like, how does that work?

Yeah, I mean, it's so wild because here's the thing. So before I answer that, when you go through the gospels and this really stuck out to me because I had never gone through the Bible with the lens of, let me look at what evil is and let me look at, let me look only at the possession story.

So it was a totally different way of looking at scripture to kind of isolate these things. The thing that we are never told about any, and I have to imagine it's by design, any of the stories in the New Testament of possession, we're never told how people became possessed.

We're just not told that. We meet them on their journey as they're seeking healing. We see them as Jesus is healing them and that's it. We don't know how they got there. And so we do know, we do know that scripture tells us, avoid psychics, avoid divination, avoid trying to communicate with the dead, avoid all of these things.

These are not things that we should be engaging in the Old Testament, especially is very clear on this. And so when you talk about Ouija boards, which is a tool to communicate with the dead, when you talk about all of these different things, you can get engaged in, some of those are lighter fare.

You think they're parlor games. So you play around with those things. Those are things that could potentially, according to experts, open a door, right? And when I say, according to experts, the people who deal with these situations will tell you that these are the things that people many times have started to play around with before they've started experiencing these spiritual issues.

Now, possession is very rare. And this was something that came from all the experts I talked to across the board. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen. It means that most of the time, people will assume they're dealing with possession and they're dealing with something else.

There's a natural explanation, or there's mental illness, or there's something else happening with that person. And so there's a lot of due diligence that goes into, or there should be rather, that goes into making sure that you're dealing with actual spiritual issues.

The bigger problem that people face is really oppression. That's very different from possession. Oppression is when people's lives, and this could happen to Christians too, are being impacted in a negative way by the demonic realm, right?

That there's something happening. Maybe it's an activity you're engaged in. Maybe it's something you're doing that's opening that door. And at the core of this is this debate. Can a Christian be possessed?

Yeah. Right?

Can a Christian who has the Holy Spirit actually also be possessed? And so I've got some very interesting reactions to that. Although most of the theologians I spoke with would say, no, that a full possession is not possible for a Christian to experience.